How to Fix a Bad Recipe

To continue the pumpkin puree saga, I wanted make pumpkin pancakes. I found this recipe and decided to give it a try.

I was so excited to wake up on Saturday to make pumpkin pancakes! I like breakfast, but I don’t usually have the time in the morning to eat much more than a yogurt or banana.

I wanted to make a big breakfast, since this was a special treat. I had a big menu planned; fresh squeezed OJ, scrambled eggs, bacon, and pumpkin pancakes with walnuts and blackberry syrup.

Saturday morning I woke up, gathered all necessary ingredients and started with the pancakes.

Pumpkin Pancakes

Ingredients:

• 3 cups organic all purpose flour
• 1 1/2 TSP salt
• 1 1/2 TSP baking soda
• 1 quart buttermilk
• 1/2 cup organic unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 cups organic pumpkin puree

This is what ended up happening to my pancake batter.

I first whisked together the flour, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl.

Then I poured in the butter, which I had decided to melt, and pumpkin puree. I added the buttermilk slowly as I was stirring.

I ended up with a fairly fluffy and thick batter. It seemed like it could work for pancakes, so I heated up a pan to make some pancakes.

To make them I put a little bit of butter in the skillet so the pancakes would brown nicely, and would be easy to flip. I poured a little less than 1/4 cup into the skillet (I like big pancakes). Something seemed wrong. The bubbles weren’t forming like they did the last time I made pancakes…

The pancake ended up not cooking through and it was very dense. I wasn’t sure what to do.

I decided to try another pancake, I thought maybe I hadn’t waited long enough for the pan to heat up. The same thing happened with the second pancakes. I really was confused now. I re-read the recipe and realized it didn’t have any eggs and thought that might be the problem. I added in an egg and tried a third pancake. Still no luck.

How I Fixed It!

At this point I was frustrated that yet another recipe didn’t turn out, and that I would not be getting my awesome breakfast. I was determined to make something of this. I knew there had to be something I could make of all this so called buttermilk pumpkin pancake batter.

I preheated my oven to 350º F and decided to add in a 1/4 cup of flour, about 1/2 a cup sugar, another egg, a bunch of spices (pumpkin pie, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon), salt, and some vanilla.

I thought maybe I could make a cake batter instead. After I mixed everything together it still didn’t seem right. I added in some more flour, and about 1/4 cup of brown sugar. I also decided to chop up the walnuts I was going to use for the pancakes, and put those in the batter.

It seemed like the right consistency, so I greased a 9×9 pan and poured in the batter. I still had a TON of batter left and used it to make muffins. The cake cooked for somewhere around 20-25 minutes and the muffins only took about 12.

The end result:

Edible, but not amazing. The cake was decently light and fluffy, but nothing like a typical cake. I thought the walnuts were a nice touch, the cake needed some texture contrast.

It still wasn’t very sweet so I made a glaze with the syrup I was going to use, and poured it on the cake. It ended up soaking in and tasting pretty good.

The muffins were more dense then the cake, but I think they would have been good with a maple cream cheese frosting, or something along those lines.

The moral of the story:

Sometimes recipes fail, but that doesn’t mean you should always give up and throw it all away! (unless it really can’t be saved…) If it looks like there is a way to make something of what you have, go for it! You don’t have anything to lose.